


Thirteenth-Stepping

by carnography (orphan_account)



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Canon Divergent, Drug Use, F/M, Gen, New Caprica AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-21
Updated: 2015-02-21
Packaged: 2018-03-14 08:35:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3404066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/carnography
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a desperation whenever they were together. A desperation that whispered, “This is all you have left.” Beneath the moans and sighs, they both could hear it--clear and terrifying and true.</p>
<p>(Season 3, Canon Divergence, AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thirteenth-Stepping

Saul’s execution was to be held in the forum.  
  
With its head cut off and its heart pulled out, the resistance would die with him. The Cylons knew this. There wouldn’t be any earthworm revivals—not without Saul Tigh. Not without Sam Anders, who stood alongside Saul and waited with him on death row.  
  
Bill Adama, the former Admiral, looked out to the west and saw the hulking wreckage of his battlestar pressed against the milky horizon. It had been eight months since that day, that day for freedom, when Sharon betrayed the uniform and the old girl fell out of the sky. She wouldn’t fly again. It was pure luck that he had emerged from the remains at all, when the likes of Karl Agathon and Aaron Kelly had perished in the crash.  
  
There were days that he wished he hadn’t made it out. Going down with his ship would have at least spared him the sight of his best friend’s hanging.  
  
Everyone was pressed against each other, huddled close for heat. Bill felt so tired, as if he were slowly slipping away with each crushing movement of his lungs.  
  
He was alone. Kara wasn’t there. She was gone. Kept in one of the feared houses on the hill, If she were still alive at all. Ellen was dead. Lee was on shift at the quarry. And Laura wasn’t there. Laura, who had taken to lying on the floor of their little house and licking her hand for some semblance of relief. Laura, who needed a purpose...Laura, who had none now.  
  
A hush fell over the throng, and there was just the desolate-sounding wind against the wooden stilts of the platform. The stairs leading up to the scaffold creaked with every step. A D’Anna and a Cavil lead the three men: a reliable agent named Winters, poor Sam Anders, and Saul. A Five prodded Saul with his firearm, poking the muzzle between his shoulder-blades. He only shuffled through the mud, limping with his bad leg. His face betrayed no fear. Instead, he carried a refined sort of hatred that only the tortured and the damned can reflect in their frowns and in the dark pits of their eyes. The sort of hatred that’s impossible to camouflage once it’s sunken into your marrow and defines who you are.  
  
“They’ll never break me, Bill,” Saul had said one time, after his sixth or seventh turn in detention. His lip was mangled and his stare was crazy and Bill knew that they already had. They’d broken bones; they’d broken his heart. Eventually, they’d broken down his mind. Now, they were just finishing the job.  
  
A breath caught in Bill’s throat and built a little ball. Saul wouldn’t die as he’d lived. He wasn’t that man anymore. None of them were the men they used to be or the men they wanted to be. The men they needed to be.  
  
“Phillip Winters, Samuel Anders, and Saul Tigh were charged and found guilty of high treason…”  
  
Saul caught his eye as the the Five wrapped the noose around his neck. He nodded once, saluting. Bill nodded back, bringing his hand to his forehead. This was it.  
  
Cavil, a smirk on his godsforsaken face, hit the lever.  
  
Saul dropped.  
  
There was silence in the crowd.  
  
Saul struggled a bit, twitching like a fish caught on the line. His boots knocked together with sickening click-clacks. His face scrunched against the burning friction of the rope. Bill let out a shuddering breath, his mouth crumpling as Saul stilled and his head hung limp. He swung, back and forth. Dead.  
  
Bill couldn’t stay to watch the other two killed, not as he heard Sam crying out for Kara. One last-ditch effort that she might hear him somewhere—anywhere.  
  
Bill pushed his way through the dense crowd, lumbering out of the forum and trudging through the mud. He made it a few steps down his alley before he stumbled behind a shack and puked his brains out. The vomit left a trail of acid that seared his throat and left him lightheaded.  
  
He fell to the ground, his knees wet and soaked through with sludge. His hands trembled and he curled his fingers into fists — mashed them into the ground. Maybe New Caprica might feel it.  
  
He wanted it to feel it. He wanted to snap this skeleton planet into two.  
  
He looked to the sky—cold and cloudy and white. And he heard the familiar sounds of distant loneliness, of the wind howling over this wasteland. Its biting cold ran through him and it rattled him, how brutal it always was. For the first time in a long time, Bill thought of Earth. Green and waiting, expectant and lush. And how they would never see it. How he would never see the stars but through the lens of this cruel atmosphere.  
  
It filled him with a half-crazy desperation that stoked his coals and squeezed his heart.  
  
He needed a drink. Stiff and strong.  
  
He needed something to keep from screaming.

***

  
It had been five months to the day since Saul’s death and New Caprica was balmy and bright and nowhere near that foggy, dreary afternoon.

But Bill didn’t think about Saul while he toiled away in the quarry and heaved his shoddy pick-axe into the lake-bed.

(Laura’s dream lake. Completely drained in the search for raw materials. It killed him to to chip away at it.)

The Cylons had every able-bodied man, and a handful of military women, allocated to mining and building. The stone and other raw materials were hauled to the designated construction sites located on the outskirts of the residential city, which by now had evolved from canvas tents to shanties made of wood and tin.

But the construction and the mining and the farming and all the other indentured tasks that the Cylons assigned to the people were just veiled exercises in oppression. The work kept them tired, kept them complacent. They didn’t have the strength required for violent conspiracies after a hard day’s work at the quarry. And everyone knew it. Because the Centurions could do twice the work in half the time, and instead they were assigned to patrol the perimeter of the lake like watchdogs.

It was a good strategy, because it worked. Since Saul’s death, there hadn’t been the barest whisper of uprising. Now, resistance wasn’t worth the effort. Now, the occupation was the system and they were all just operating within its perameters. Even Bill Adama.

Because while he chopped away at cold rock, sweat dripping down his temples, he didn’t think of Saul and he didn’t nurse thoughts of revenge or dreams of a grand exodus. He thought of his beautiful drug-addled wife and his infant grandson, who Lee and Dee had named Erich. He thought of what food they might or not have. He thought of supplies, dinner, sex, Joe’s, Laura, sex, whiskey, sex, chamalla, his next shift …

He thought of being on the wrong side of sixty and _thank the Gods_ he was boxer, or else this kind of work would be killing him.

At the end of his shift, he walked down the mountain with thirty other men. There wasn’t much talking. There was just the steady dragging of feet along the dirt road and the low groans of fatigue. Bill paid attention to the mosaic of sunlight that sifted through the tree leaves. It sprayed a scattered pattern of light in front of his feet. He tried to enjoy the whistling breeze, instead of grousing over how drunk he’d like to get tonight or how drunk he wished he was.

Beauty was a rare thing on New Caprica, and every moment he witnessed it was another moment when the urge to drink began to subside.

For his own sanity, he tried to concentrate on those beautiful things.

***

  
The fire was fuzzy and warm, crackling in and cracking out. Laura watched it moving around behind the grate. She didn’t know why the metaphor for fire movement was dance, when the flames were clearly licking and reaching. All singular upward movements that blinked in and out of existence. Reaching and disappearing, reaching and disappearing.  
  
Laura had been watching the fire for what seemed like minutes, but was (in all likelihood) hours. It was getting darker outside, dusk creeping up with it’s long dark fingers. She was curled up on the bed pallet, unable to keep from smiling as the fire popped and sparked. Her palm was sticky and the inside of her mouth felt like wool. Chamalla’s tell-tale bitterness lingered on her tongue.  
  
The high wasn’t as good as it used to be. She couldn’t see things anymore. The hallucinations that once terrified her had become an escape, a destination. And now her chamalla high was just _this_ —an empty promise, a dulled euphoria that heightened her awareness of everything about this wretched place. Its smells, its sights, and its textures.  
  
 _“I’ve given you the strongest mixture I have, Madame President,” Selloi said with an air of impatience, sitting in her rags and surrounded by her stones. She drew her bottom lip in like a turtle and stared at her with wide eyes. Selloi was the only oracle left with a stockpile of extract and while she usually prohibited sale to anyone but her fellow oracles, she had agreed to sell vials to Laura in exchange for sweet things. Candy, honey, tea, small packets of sugar.  
  
“It’s not enough,” Laura replied, her voice cold and demanding. She crossed her arms.  
  
Selloi smirked. “The high isn’t quite the same after the body develops a dependency…”  
  
“I’m not dependent, “ Laura argued. She massaged her lips together. Knowing how full of shit that was, especially as she stood there — fingers quivering, her body overcome with a sickness that she knew as withdrawal. She’d experienced it before, when she was in prison. It had been the most horrifying sensory experience of her life.  
  
Selloi dug inside her robes and procurred a long, thin tube filled with dark powder. Laura breathed out, aching for it — practically drooling like Pavlov’s dog. But she drew back, revolted by her reaction. She wasn’t some frakking junkie. She wasn’t an addict. Not like Selloi and not like Selloi insinuated.  
  
“It’s never going to be the same,” Selloi said with a regretful chuckle, shaking the vial back and forth. “You won’t get one-tenth of the high you’re seeking, even if you down the whole bottle. Not even if you take it in lines.”  
  
“Then there’s no point in taking it,” Laura replied, moving to leave.  
  
Selloi laughed then. “We both know it’s not that simple.”  
  
No, it wasn’t.  
  
“There’s nothing wrong with emulating the gods,” Selloi murmured then, “Junkies, all of them. Just like the rest of us. It’s all happened before and it will all happen again. Again and again and again. They never get their fill of violence or passion or offerings. And neither will you or I.”  
  
Disgusted and entirely too proud, Laura turned to leave the oracle’s tent.  
  
She slunk back within the hour._  
  
Laura’s smile faded. Her fingertips flinched away from her red blanket. The cheapjack stitching felt like tiny teeth scraping against her nerves; as if every time she touched it, this New Caprican weave was eating away at her — bit by bit. Wearing her away in small increments that she wouldn’t notice until she was completely gone.  
  
The thought frightened her.  
  
Her body felt heavy and her heart was quick and the ground crunched outside the shack. The sound of heavy boots right outside her door. Panic flared up. Primal and pure.  
  
 _Cavil placed two, grainy photographs on the steel tabletop. He slid them toward her. One was a blurry candid of the Chief, bearded and frozen in conversation. The other was of Tory—a professional portrait that Laura remembered seeing in the Fleet presses.  
  
“We want to know the whereabouts of these two …”  
  
The Cylon, theatrical as always, raised his hands and mimed a few air quotations.  
  
“… persons of interest.”  
  
He sat down in the seat across from her. “We’ve come to understand that you are, or were, rather close to a few key players in this little splinter faction.”  
  
She leaned back in the chair.  
  
“I don’t know where they are.”  
  
Cavil snorted. “Well, this was a complete waste of time.”  
  
Her feet were freezing, bare on the concrete floor and Cavil’s icy sneer — half-amused and half-poisonous — made her shudder. The cell reeked of bleach. And the thought entered Laura’s mind that tonight she might not make it back. She didn’t have the answers he was looking for. She never did.  
  
Cavil stared at her for a long moment.  
  
“Y’know, Ma-dame President, sometimes my … brothers and sisters … forget that human beings are animals. Housebroken animals, but animals nonetheless. Creatures of habit. Slaves to primitive imperatives. Our gravest mistake is forgetting_ that _because when we do, what happens? Enslavement, suicide bombings, murder, rape, torture. It’s revolting, you know.”  
  
Laura tried to shake the stink of the antiseptics. She stared, unblinking, at the Cylon. “You have a point?”  
  
This wasn’t just a lecture.  
  
He smirked.  
  
“Well, I’ve come to realize that sometimes those are the only things that you people understand. Your comforting, little habits need to be thoroughly … disrupted … to get anywhere at all,” Cavil said.  
  
He drummed his fingers against the tabletop.  
  
“Y’see, there’s just so much information rattling around in that little head of yours. And if you’re not willing to give it up… well, I’m afraid we’ll have to take a page from our parents and … disrupt you a little.”_

***

  
When he entered the city, Bill took the back route to their hovel. He preferred not to cross through the forum or the busier alleyways.  
  
Their house was an ugly one but the sight of it—squeezed between two equally ugly shanties—comforted him. There was a wind chime made of scrap metals that hung from the overhang of their tin roof and the small chime sounded like home.  
  
Bill swung open the door. It creaked, protesting against its jambs, and snapped shut behind him.  
  
Laura was sprawled half-naked in front of their small stove, wearing only an old dress shirt. She flinched when she heard him enter and her eyes were wide with momentary surprise. It was her first instinct when the door opened behind her—she tensed up, she jumped. She was always so afraid. But only for the second before she recognized him.  
  
When she did, Laura relaxed back into the cushions and gave him a dewy smile.  
  
“It’s you,” she said, low and soft.  
  
“It’s me,” he replied, sitting at one of their rickety chairs and pulling off his boots. He tossed them both aside and sighed in relief.  
  
As always, there were two glasses at the end of their bedding. One empty, the other three-quarters full. Sitting there for her cottonmouth.  
  
She'd started up after the Cylons abolished human-operated education stations. But back then, the chamalla was something she could take or leave. She could push off and he could tow her back in—easily, happily. It wasn’t a big deal.  
  
But since her stay in detention, a terrifying twelve hours for which she had been missing, Laura's drug habit had completely eclipsed everything. She hadn't told him what had happened to her during the interrogation, but she wore a reminder of its violence on her face. A scar, thin and white, stretched from the corner of her mouth to her cheekbone. It had healed well but it gleamed beneath any sort of light and there was no mistaking it as a deformity.  
  
It reminded him everyday of how they had broken her, how he'd escaped three visits to the detention center with little more than a black eye.  
  
The Cylons didn't reel him in anymore, nor did they bother with Laura. But during the collapse of the resistance, they black-bagged him a couple of times. Gave him the third degree. Always about the whereabouts of the Chief or Miss Foster or the location of the underground base —who belonged to the ranks and who didn't. Once, Sharon and a D'Anna questioned him. They wanted to know about the living Hera Agathon —the lie that had warped Sharon into a turncoat and brought down the entire Exodus. The lie that had destroyed everything.  
  
It had destroyed Saul. It had destroyed Laura. It had destroyed them all.  
  
There were two flasks of moonshine that rested on the windowsill in the washroom. He looked through the tattered curtains that separated the alcove from the rest of the house. It was dark with the late afternoon and the bottles rested there — untouched.  
  
"Do you want something to eat?" Laura asked.  
  
She didn’t wait for his answer.  
  
There was a rudimentary icebox that sat beside their table and she unlatched it. They had some smoked jerky left, a half a loaf of sourdough bread, and a few of those bitter-bitter fruits that grew along the delta. They looked like little, misshapen apples. She pulled out a modest portion of each and set them on the place in front of him, disappearing behind the washroom curtains for only a few seconds before she emerged with a jug of alcohol. She set it on the table and took her place across from him.  
  
“Thank you,” he said, smiling at her.  
  
Laura just hummed, shrugging a little as he sat.

***

  
Bill didn’t ask her if she had eaten. She always responded with the same white lie. By now, she thought, maybe he had caught on.  
  
He didn’t question her anymore. About what had happened in detention, about the chamalla, about her eating habits or her sleeping habits. And in return, she didn’t question him about the alcohol.  
  
But Laura understood better than he thought she did, about why he drank so often and so hard, why he kept jugs of Joe’s brew stashed around the house. Why he drank at night, when he thought that no one could see.  
  
Ever since Saul’s death, he’d hit the bottle hard. He lost his best friend; he wanted a piece of him back. And the Colonel’s defining attributes were always his flaws. Bill missed him more than he could or would say. He lost something integral, something defining. She understood it. She lost someone, too. She lost that woman, the dying leader. She lost her. Laura lost everything about herself.  
  
But it was difficult to hope for anything more than small, quiet comforts nowadays. It was hard to feel good outside of her habits, her routines. Just like the Cylon had told her—many, many times over. It was human nature.  
  
She couldn’t think about overthrowing a regime or finding Earth or the greater good of things, what was worth fighting for and what was not. Instead, she hoped for good weather and good health, something different (something vibrant and bright) when she licked her hand.  
  
(She would take the snakes. She would take anything.)  
  
She hoped for Bill. She hoped for his hands and his mouth. It was easy to hope for him, easy to hope for one high after coming down from another – instead of tearing her apart, it put her back together again. She had an identity with Bill. She was something with him.  
  
Bill looked different than how he used to. His hair was uncombed and his mustache was full. He’d lost weight and replaced it with muscle. The work was rough and the food was scarce and as a result, he was a browned hulk of a man. He looked so basic and so honest, human in a way that they’d all forgotten about while they sat in their window-plated skyscrapers and five-star cocktail bars. Sitting up there in space and debating the finer points of Colonial law.  
  
In a way that was different than how it was before, Laura was attracted to him. He looked safe and he made her feel safe. He was a part of her. And more times than he was willing to give it to her, she wanted him over her and inside her and filling her up. She wanted it like that for days on end.  
  
If Laura thought about it too hard, she would disappoint herself. She used to stand alone. She used to prefer it. Now, she needed him … she needed the chamalla … just to stay afloat, gasping for air. Her limbs were so heavy beneath her, dragging her down.  
  
It felt as if this planet had half-digested her.  
  
Bill sat there, eating his dinner. He looked up at her a few times and she smiled at him. She dug into the wood of their table with one of her fingernails. She traced a circle, over and over.  
  
He stopped eating and his head was bowed, staring at his food. He reached for the bottle but resisted it…this time.  
  
“Laura,” he said, deep and soft, “C’mere.”  
  
She got up from the table and closed the distance. She cradled his head as rested it against her breasts. Her fingers wound through his hair, running against the roots of his hair.  
  
He looked up at her, his fingers tracing her bare thigh and lingering at the hem of her shirt.  
  
“You smell good,” he murmured.  
  
She hummed and smiled, bending down to place a kiss on the crown of his head.  
  
“Do you want me?” she whispered.  
  
They didn’t do the slow seductions anymore, the romantic bits that they used to. There wasn’t any teasing. There wasn’t any finesse. But neither of them seemed to care. They just needed it and they knew that they needed it, and sometimes you had to get in the mood real fast. You had to catch up.  
  
“Yeah,” he said.  
  
And it was good, it always good, when they both wanted it at the same time. When they both wanted to get lost in the same, compact moment.  
  
Bill shook from her embrace and stood from his seat. He nudged her against the edge of the table. It knocked against her hip. Bill held her face in his hands and he pressed an urgent, messy kiss against her mouth. She opened up, drew in his warmth with a small moan. The air around her lost its cold edge, getting heavier and damper with the firm slide of his tongue against hers. Her nose bent against his and his mustache scraped against her upper lip. He plumped her breasts, squeezed forcefully enough to hurt. He grunted against her lips. She breathed out.  
  
It all felt so good.  
  
Laura fondled the growing bulge in his pants, felt him harden beneath her touch as she rubbed and tugged at his erection. Bill groaned, his lips sliding to her jaw and latching onto her neck. His mouth was wet and hot and Laura inhaled the scent of him. The strength of him as his hands grabbed her ass and pushed her up against his body. He smelled like sweat and dirt, like old mineral water that stuck to the skin. It was the undeniable scent of the mountain and the quarry and of the lake that once held water as clear as glass.  
  
“Let’s go to bed, Bill,” she panted.  
  
He took a step back and pulled off his old military tanks, the fabric growing thinner and thinner everyday. His chest was broad and bronzed, his scar not so red anymore. Not so visible against his darkened skin. Laura fingers wound around his belt and she looked up to see him watching her, his chest rising and falling as she flicked the clasp and pulled the leather strap toward her chest. She set the belt on the table with a hard clunk. He smiled.  
  
“You gonna take that old thing off?” he asked, following her to the pallet.  
  
Laura grinned, settling back into the bedding. She rested back on her elbows and Bill lowered down on his knee, shuffling to a spot between her legs. The fire from the stove cast an orange glow over half his face. The imperfections of his skin sharpened on one side and softened on the other. His hands moved up and down her calves, leisurely and gentle.  
  
“Someday I want a real bed,” he said.  
  
Laura shrugged. “It’s fine.”  
  
“You’ve forgotten how good it is.”  
  
His hands grasped the bottom of her shirt, slipped one button free and then another. Laura sat up and helped him, peeling apart both halves.  
  
One of his fingers traced the curls between her legs and then moved upward to circle her navel. Laura shivered, her nerves sparking and prickling. Every bit of her seemed to tingle with excitement. Bill filled his hands with her breasts, pinching her nipples between his knuckles and emptying her lungs. They couldn’t seem to fill up with enough air.  
  
She pulled him down on top of her. The pillow hit the back of her head and his body pressed down against hers and she felt enveloped, overwhelmed by the strength of him and the size of him and the wholeness of him. Her hands trailed over his brawny arms and his sturdy back, over every bit of him that was the picture of perfect health. Laura pushed her nose into his neck, nibbled gently on the rough skin. He trembled and gripped her thighs, pressing into her skin so painfully that she could almost feel the blood vessels breaking.  
  
She loved it, whimpered it into the rapid heartbeat that she found buried in his neck.  
  
Bill pulled back. He looked in her eyes, so intent as to see straight through. She gave him that certain, languid smile (easy delivery, her teeth pressed against her lower lip) that usually threw him off her tracks.  
  
It didn't work this time.  
  
“You’re sober?”  
  
He was pleading with her whenever he asked. As if (her, him, them) being sober changed what this was, what this meant. As if nothing was really true when he was shitfaced drunk or she was baked beyond recognition. Bill needed it to be more than them being animals doing what animals do. He needed to know if this was about love, instead of comfort. About choice rather than addiction, about lust rather than habit.  
  
And was it all of those things? Was it none of them? Was it ever anything, really?  
  
She didn’t know.  
  
She didn’t care. Not like he did.  
  
She just needed the feeling.  
  
He needed beautiful words. He needed to hope for those higher-minded things. Bill still thought that they could change all of this self-destruction.  
  
Laura knew better.  
  
“Yes,” she said, reassuring him. She was—and always had been—a practiced liar.  
  
He seemed to believe her, as he always did. It was better for the both of them if he did.  
  
The next kiss was so deep, so dark and complete. And Laura relished in the feeling that vibrated in her bones. He moved his hips against her, grinding down. The fabric of his trousers scratched against the sensitive skin at her core and it was rough. It made her hungrier. It damn near drove her crazy.  
  
“I need to feel you, Bill," she whispered, closing her eyes.  
  
The sound of his zipper quivered up her spine. She arched with its movement, like a wave, her body pressing up against his until the current reached the very tips of her hair. It made her toes curl. He breathed out, heavy and low, and looked down between their bodies as he thrust into her. The feeling spiked up her torso and ripped a small moan from her throat.  
  
Bill smiled above her and lifted her leg against his hip. He pumped into her as her nails scored down his back. She felt so full, almost to bursting, as he fucked her. His mouth hovering above hers, his elbows by her ears, his hands clutching at the hair of her temples — tugging on her with each movement in and then out. She pulled him close, so close that she could feel his sweat all over her body, sliding against her with each snap of his hips against hers. Her hips against his.  
  
She could feel his eyes on her face.  
  
“Laura…” His voice was strained, almost broken. She knew what he wanted to say and she covered his mouth with her palm.  
  
“Don’t. Please, don’t.”  
  
“But you are,” he said into her mouth, between kisses. “You are ...”  
  
He used to always say it, until she asked him not to.  
  
There only needed to be one liar in their bed and there was nothing beautiful about her now. She used to be pretty, when pretty was something you could be. Now, she was just scarred and just barely scraping by and there was nothing beautiful about either of those things. Now, she was just wild and it drove him wild and it wasn’t beauty, it was instinct. It was this furnace between them, where they escaped.  
  
She looked away from him and stared at the fire through the grate of the stove. How it reached and reached and reached. She could feel it inside of her. Laura slid against him, hissed at him to move faster. She needed it hard. Bill sucked on one of her breasts and applied his teeth to her skin. He gripped her hip.  
  
He gave it to her – those crazy, hot thrusts that she begged for. He growled against her neck, his merciless finger playing at her clit. And then, she tightened up. She was there.  
  
Release. She just wanted some relief.  
  
And she got it.  
  
But, it wasn’t quite right.  
  
It wasn’t quite enough. It wasn’t what it used to be.  
  
Just like her high, It was desaturated and sad and done.  
  
Laura felt like she could cry.  She dug her nails into his back and a quiet sob escaped her lips. It sounded good, though. It sounded satisfied. And Bill’s movements grew erratic and disjointed until he pounded into her for the last time. He shuddered, his arms quivering as he began to soften and relax against her.  
  
He was coming down. She was still lost.  
  
His hands turned gentle. His teeth were replaced with soft, soft lips.  
  
But Laura couldn’t relax her hands.  
  
Her nails still clawed into his back.

***

  
Laura looked truly peaceful as she slept, so far removed from her usual frenzy. Her usual feverish calm. She was tucked against his side, breathing deep and slow. The fire in the stove was dwindling, the coals were bright and red beneath the flames.  
  
  
It was late and quiet.  
  
  
His body was sore with her scratches and forceful lovebites – bright welts were beginning to rise on his arms. Bits and pieces of him were tacky with sweat and sticky with sex. And with the dusty layer of quarry air still overlaying his skin, Bill felt too dirty to sleep. He sat up, his limbs still purring from the sex, and got to his feet.  
  
He knocked over one of her glasses of water.  
  
“Ah, shit.”  
  
Laura murmured in her sleep and rustled a bit before she snuggled into the bedding and went still.  
  
Bill shuffled into the dark washroom, pushing aside the ratty curtain and letting it fall shut behind him. It was almost black in the small closet; but through its tiny window, the moon projected a deep blue light into the space.  
  
Another bottle sat on the sill, almost empty of booze and crusted over with dirt and calcium deposits. The moon outlined its shape and made it glow. He avoided it and looked down at the shallow basin. He dipped their washcloth into the tepid water and ran it over his skin, covered all the nooks and crannies. It felt good, better than it usually did, when he splashed the old water over his face and ran his wet fingertips through his hair. He’d go to the shower house in the morning. For now, this would do.  
  
They had an old, cracked mirror propped up behind the basin and he couldn’t help but look at his dingy reflection. He usually avoided this mirror. He never liked what he saw. Especially his bisecting scar. And it was usually the first thing he noticed. Bill ran a few fingers down the line and grimaced at how strange it still felt. Almost like touching his insides. He shook his head, grabbed the bottle off the shelf and shambled out.  
  
There was a hole in the far wall, from the blow of his pick-axe a few months ago. He and Laura had an argument and since he had the tendency to destroy things when he was frustrated, he swung the godsdamn thing into the wall. He kept meaning to fix it, but he never seemed to scrabble enough time to patch it up. Laura said she didn’t mind. But it bothered him.  
  
He glanced at Laura, sleeping naked in their bed. The glow from the embers reflected off her hip. Her wild hair was splayed all around her head.  
  
She was beautiful.  
  
And he couldn’t leave her. He couldn’t stop loving her, even when she terrified him. Even when he was sure that he’d lost her.  
  
She filled him with a half-crazy desperation that got him going. She squeezed his heart, the way she lied and the way she didn't. The way they were dwindling down.  
  
He took a drink.  
  
It was stiff and strong.  
  
But this time, it wasn't nearly strong enough.  



End file.
